1/10. The claim that Trump won the election is a big lie.

2/10. A big lie changes reality. To believe it, people must disbelieve their senses, distrust their fellow citizens, and live in a world of faith.
3/10. A big lie demands conspiracy thinking, since all who doubt it are seen as traitors.
4/10. A big lie undoes a society, since it divides citizens into believers and unbelievers.
5/10. A big lie destroys democracy, since people who are convinced that nothing is true but the utterances of their leader ignore voting and its results.
6/10. A big lie must bring violence, as it has.
7/10. A big lie can never be told just by one person. Trump is the originator of this big lie, but it could never have flourished without his allies on Capitol Hill.
8/10. Political futures now depend on this big lie. Senators Hawley and Cruz are running for president on the basis of this big lie.
9/10. There is a cure for the big lie. Our elected representatives should tell the truth, without dissimulation, about the results of the 2020 election.
10/10. Politicians who do not tell the simple truth perpetuate the big lie, further an alternative reality, support conspiracy theories, weaken democracy, and foment violence far worse than that of January 6, 2021.

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In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.